Daniel Handler Quotes

We live in a world of denial, and we don't know what the truth is anymore.

If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.

An ability to look into the confusing mess of life and see things for what they are.

Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man.

The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either.

Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about is this: That’s life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on.

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.

Lack of understanding is always painful.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

I feel like I've dreamed half of my life that hasn't happened yet, so a lot of times I'm going along, and I do stuff, and I know that I've done it. I have deja vus more than I have regular experiences. If half of your day is a deja vu, then you start to wonder, 'What is real and what isn't?'

People take reality for granted.

There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know.

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life in general, is confusion. The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you're going to find out you're wrong - that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

There's so many different types of illusions; our lives are an illusion in a sense.

Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.

Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.

There is no proof. There are no authorities whatever. No president, Academy, Court of Law, Congress or Senate on this earth has the knowledge or power to decide what will be the knowledge of tomorrow. There is no use in trying to prove something that is unknown to somebody who is ignorant of the unknown, or fearful of its threatening power. Only the good old rules of learning will eventually bring about understanding of what has invaded our earthly existence.

Life is not always what we think it is.